“I was at dinner with our scout in Japan and he made a comment that even truck drivers throw 95 over here,” said Oakland’s Assistant General Manager Dan Feinstein. “That caught my attention. I said, ‘If that’s true, maybe we should be trying out some of these truck drivers.'”

Feinstein soon decided to run an experiment. Oakland advertised an open tryout for pitchers and invited players with a college pedigree to send video to the A’s scouting department. From there, the team invited 60 of them to throw in front of scouts. One of them, right-hander Shohei Tomioka, bumped 95 on the gun, which impressed Oakland enough to offer him a contract then and there. “We call it the truck driver tryout,” Feinstein said with a chuckle.

Tomioka’s story was only possible because of a brilliant combination of scouting and technology, with a dash of luck mixed in. His signing is also an indication that the international talent market is laden with players just waiting to be discovered. See, Tomioka wasn’t simply a truck driver with a live arm. He was an experienced pitcher, a graduate of one of Tokyo’s top baseball programs — he was just never seen at the right time by the right people. By the time Oakland discovered him, he was loitering in a small local league. “There’s a lot of independent ball over there,” Feinstein says, “and he had been pitching in one of these kind of obscure leagues. He was free to try out and was throwing 95 so we signed him.”

For anyone lamenting the rise of big tech in baseball or the demise of the scout, Tomioka is living proof that, for good and for ill, an element of the unpredictable remains in the game. His signing demonstrates the value of having a robust international department, while also highlighting how fertile the international market is today, and how teams that invest abroad now stand to reap a competitive advantage in the years to come. To get a better sense of how that might develop, let’s take a deeper dive into how teams scout internationally today. Read the rest of this entry »

Xzavion Curry is a prospect-on-the-rise in the Cleveland organization. A seventh-round pick in 2019 out of Georgia Tech, the 23-year-old right-hander is 8-1 with a 2.23 ERA in 18 starts between Low-A Lynchburg and High-A Lake County. With the lion’s share at the latter, Curry has allowed just 65 hits in 93 innings. Moreover, he’s fanned 118 batters and issued just 16 free passes.

Command is Curry’s forte, but it’s not his only attribute. As our own Eric Longenhagen wrote in early June, the 5-foot-11, 195-pound hurler’s “vertical arm slot creates angle and carry on a fastball that plays well at the letters.” Augmenting Curry’s 91-94 mph four-seamer are a curveball, a slider, and a changeup.

He’s only been a full-time pitcher for a handful of years. Curry came to Georgia Tech as a two-way player, having excelled both on the mound and at short as an Atlanta-area prep. That his college coaches made him a full-time pitcher is a testament to changing times. Curry is African-American, and Black players have historically been channeled into position-player roles. Black pitchers have been at a premium.

“That does enter my mind,” said Curry, who had a 17-inning scoreless streak come to an end earlier this week. “As I go around to different places, and play different teams, I don’t really see a lot of Black pitchers. So that is something I’ve noticed, but as the younger generation goes forward, those guys just keep getting better and better. We have a couple in our organization, and I’m pretty sure we’ll start to see more and more Black pitchers.”

Curry cited a different sport when addressing his plus command. Read the rest of this entry »

In one of the oddest twists of the season, the Atlanta Braves have seen their playoff odds skyrocket after losing one of the league’s best players, Ronald Acuña Jr., to a torn ACL that prematurely ended his 2021 season. Now up to 81.9% odds of making the postseason from a low of a 7% chance — the 2019 Nationals never dipped under 22% in our projections — the Braves seem much more likely to be successful than not. And regardless of whether the season ends on a positive note, all of Atlanta’s key contributors are under team control in 2022 with one exception. But that exception is quite notable: 2020 National League MVP Freddie Freeman.

The general assumption around baseball — one that I also hold — has been that Freeman will of course be back with the Braves in 2022. After 12 seasons in Atlanta, during which Freeman was quite purposefully kept as the face of the team even while the Braves were aggressively rebuilding several years ago, seeing him in another uniform would just seem odd, almost on par with seeing Derek Jeter in Dodger Blue or Cal Ripken Jr. in green and gold. But the fates don’t care about looking bizarre, and the fact remains is that we’re entering mid-September, and player and team have yet come to an agreement on a contract extension. Jon Heyman reported on Thursday that there was still a gap between Freeman and the Braves:

Freddie Freeman and Braves have been talking but there’s still a gap so free agency appears a surprisingly strong possibility. Both sides want to get it done and that’s the likelihood eventually. Reminiscent of Turner/LAD and HOF Jeter/NYY talks, great FA who stayed. @MLBNetwork

— Jon Heyman (@JonHeyman) September 9, 2021

Read the rest of this entry »

Less than four weeks remain in the 2021 regular season, and while the coronavirus pandemic continues due to the Delta surge, MLB is back to some semblance of normalcy (though don’t tell that to the Red Sox). We’ve got a 162-game regular season, a comprehensible 10-team postseason format, the possibility of actual tiebreaker games being played if necessary — all of which were off the table last season — and no neutral sites. We’ve got some real playoff races as well, with the potential to produce end-of-season chaos.

Welcome back to Team Entropy. If you’re new here, don’t worry, I’ll catch you up.

A decade ago, during the wild 2011 races that resulted in the Rays and Cardinals snatching spots away from the collapsing Red Sox and Braves, respectively, on the season’s final day, I coined the phrase “Team Entropy” — taking a page from the Second Law of Thermodynamics, which states that all systems tend toward disorder — to describe the phenomenon of rooting for scenarios that produced such mayhem. I’ve returned to the concept annually, tracking the possibilities for end-of-season, multi-team pileups that would require MLB to deviate from its previously scheduled programming.

The idea is that if you’re a die-hard fan of a team trying to secure (or avoid blowing) a playoff spot, flag-waving for your squad of choice takes precedence, but if you’ve embraced the modern day’s maximalist menu of options that allow one not just to watch scoreboards but also to view multiple games on multiple gadgets, you want more. More baseball in the form of final-weekend division and Wild Card races. More baseball in the form of extra innings and tiebreaker scenarios topped with mustard and sauerkraut (though alas, the dastardly Manfred Man will still be mucking up those tiebreakers if they go past nine innings). You have TVs, laptops, tablets, and phones stacked like a Nam June Paik installation so you can monitor all the action at once. You want the MLB schedule-makers to contemplate entering the Federal Witness Protection Program instead of untangling once-far-fetched scenarios. If all that sounds familiar, you’re one of us. Read the rest of this entry »

In the years after being drafted by the Los Angeles Angels 10th overall in 2017, Jo Adell was one of the most exciting prospects in baseball. He spent the next few season flying up prospect lists around the industry; at FanGraphs, Adell ranked 66th overall in 2018, 11th in 2019, and fourth going into 2020. Last year, he made his much-hyped debut but it went about as poorly as 38 games and 132 plate appearances can go. He struck out a shocking 41.7% of the time, with an abysmal 29 wRC+. When combined with his surprisingly poor defense, he ended up being the least valuable player in baseball last season.

Adell spent his offseason retooling his swing and sharpening his defense. The Athletic’s Fabian Ardaya had this to say about Adell’s changes:

“One day in the cage, he started to cut things down. He held his hands higher, reducing their movement before the pitch. He focused on putting his body in a position to consistently be on time and athletic, rotating through his hips to generate power instead of attempting to force it. He ditched his leg kick, opting for a toe tap that gave him more of a window to stay on time and on plane with a flatter overall approach.”

Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve always been a huge Darin Ruf fan, so getting to write about his 2021 success is a little bit more meaningful to me than it would be for almost any other player. Ruf is the last player I remember my grandfather singling out before he passed away, with the thought that Ruf, then a young prospect in the Phillies system, had the potential to be a productive big leaguer for our favorite team.

That was nine years ago. The Phillies promoted Ruf in late 2012 for his first cup of major league coffee, but he never amassed more than 297 plate appearances in any season for them. The bat was decent — Ruf posted a 105 wRC+ over 833 plate appearances, including a 125 wRC+ during his 2013 rookie season — but poor defensive numbers kept him barely above replacement-level in almost 300 games with Philadelphia. He was traded to the Dodgers in November of 2016, and even before he had an opportunity to make his organizational debut, Ruf’s contract was purchased by the Samsung Lions of the KBO. For three years, he raked in Asia, earning himself a minor league deal with the Giants for the pandemic-shortened 2020 season. (I was pretty excited.) A year later, he’s now the best hitter on a playoff-bound team (Kris Bryant is a notable omission from this list — he has a 119 wRC+ in 128 plate appearances with the Giants so far):

It’s no secret that the Giants have been receiving incredible production across their entire lineup. Their position players have posted a collective 113 wRC+ this season, a figure that ranks second in the majors among teams’ non-pitchers. But even in a lineup filled with players having above-average offensive seasons, Ruf stands out with his .279/.401/.544 slashline and 155 wRC+. That wRC+ ranks seventh in the majors among players with at least 250 plate appearances overall, sandwiched between Juan Soto (156) and Shohei Ohtani (154). That’s pretty phenomenal company, and it inspires two obvious questions. First, how did Ruf become one of the best hitters in baseball, at least this season? And, of course, how sustainable is this? Read the rest of this entry »

In 2020, Carlos Santana had a down year. That happens to players all the time, and it’s particularly excusable in the pandemic season. Sixty games can make anyone look bad, and that’s before you get into the vast changes in routine. So while a .350 slugging percentage is obviously concerning, particularly from a first baseman, it’s nothing that you couldn’t hand-wave away by whispering his walk rate or xwOBA to yourself in a soothing voice.

In 2021, Carlos Santana is having a down year. If once is a coincidence, twice is a trend, and this certainly looks bad. The Royals’ problems don’t start at first base, but he certainly hasn’t been the answer there, and I’m skeptical that things will get better. Yes: Carlos Santana has turned into a pumpkin. Read the rest of this entry »

I’ll be the first to admit that I don’t understand the Tampa Bay Rays. I don’t understand how they win as many games as they do. They’re definitely good, but it never feels like they should be as good as they are, or recently have been. But at a certain point, if they are consistently better than expected, I’m the one in the wrong and it’s on me to try to understand.

The offense I get. The current American League leader in runs scored is a little over their skis, as they hold that lead despite ranking sixth in on-base percentage and fourth in slugging (they’re fourth in team wRC+ and fifth in OPS). That’s mostly due to the fact that as a team they have greatly improved results with runners on base compared to when they’re empty. That’s more likely luck-related than some kind of mysterious clutch skill they possess, but what the Rays do have is monstrous depth. Nobody in the lineup is going to garner MVP consideration, but their ability to almost never throw out a lineup with dead innings is unmatched in baseball thanks to a roster filled with average or better players. Just look at the Rays compared to the rest of their AL East competition:

Read the rest of this entry »

I will never not be fascinated by the fact that hitters actually produce negative value when swinging. In my most recent article outlining the struggles of Jarred Kelenic, I briefly discussed this idea. Even in a sea of hitters who are below-average when swinging, Kelenic stands out as being particularly bad when he takes a hack; he’s been worth roughly -6 runs per 100 swings so far this year. And as I noted, the hitters who do the best at limiting the damage on their swings tend to be baseball’s most productive hitters overall. From that research, I found an R-squared of 0.714 between a hitter’s run value when swinging and their seasonal wOBA.

That makes a ton of sense: Hitters who maximize their production on swings — that is, both limiting whiffs and making frequent loud contact — tend to be better hitters overall. But this also got me thinking about the reverse: How does taking pitches influence a hitter’s overall production? From the Kelenic research, I found only a moderate correlation between take value and seasonal wOBA, with an R of 0.422 and an R-squared of 0.178. That’s not to say that better “takers” aren’t better hitters; it just suggests that having extremely high-value takes doesn’t necessarily lend itself to having more success overall. For posterity’s sake, here’s the plot of 2021 hitters’ run value per 100 takes and their seasonal wOBAs. Players on both ends of the wOBA spectrum are highlighted just to demonstrate a few individual examples: Read the rest of this entry »

I wish I could come to you with news about the mass adoption of backup sliders from pitchers across the league. I also wish I could come to you with a shining example of even one player who has perfected the art of the effective mistake. There is no apparent analytical case that comes to mind; it’s largely just a fascination to me — the best hitters in the world swinging through the worst offering a pitcher could imagine throwing. Here’s an example:

Matt Wisler is the perfect guy to have here — someone who throws nothing but sliders making the biggest kind of slider mistake! And yet there are times when it just works. What I want to try to answer is what makes these mistake sliders click without diving into the rabbit hole of pitch sequencing. Are there particular characteristics of movement and velocity that make for better backup sliders?

First, we have to set guidelines on what a backup slider is. You know it when you see it, but it is more broadly defined as something that “hangs” when thrown to a batter of the same handedness. Sliders behave differently depending on whether they’re thrown inside or out, as shown by Eno Sarris on this site a few years back; those away gain almost half a foot of horizontal movement compared to ones thrown inside! Sliders need height to be considered mistakes, but the distinctions in horizontal movement are too vast for an outside-and-up slider to be as bad a mistake as one up but inside. For our purposes, let’s say that a backup slider is anything in the upper third of the strike zone, middle-to-in, in a same handedness matchup. Read the rest of this entry »